“Perhaps the next development in performance poetry will be an attempt to become more like professional wrestling,” writes Gloria Klein in Letter eX (June). “A poetry ‘slam’ is not too far from it already. What is professional wrestling if not a form of entertainment that is metaphor without language? When Cactus Jack battled Arachne Man the crowd went wild. These two wrestlers even carried on their struggle outside the ring. The referee, like punctuation that no longer means anything, couldn’t get them to play by the rules.”
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“Chicago, like most big cities, defines its success by visible, built symbols,” writes Mayor Washington’s planning director Elizabeth Hollander in the anthology Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods: Progressive City Government in Chicago, 1983-1987: “the world’s tallest building, Sears Tower; the Lakefront park legacy of the Burnham plan; or the nation’s largest airport. Harold’s leadership was similarly defined and found wanting by many. It was not the legacy he sought….[Since his death] the business community, in partnership with parents and not-for-profit reform groups, overturned the city’s best-established bureaucracy in the name of educating children. That was an unimaginable strategy before Harold Washington’s tenure. In 1983 the business community didn’t know anyone Harold knew. In 1989 these same leaders were lobbying the state legislature with parents from Woodlawn and Pilsen. Harold’s legacy is not on the skyline but in the halls of the legislature and hundreds of meeting halls across the city. His legacy is in the milieu in which he thrived.”
Square miles of commercial and industrial development in the suburbs in 1970: 69.9. In 1990: 142.5. In Chicago in 1990: 28.5 (Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission 1991 Annual Report).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
